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The Ultimate Guide to the ROI of Content Marketing

Sponsor Post: Moving Prospects Through Your Sales Funnel.

From storytelling to customer engagement and moving prospects through your sales funnel, it's imperative that you develop a solid measurement strategy to identify effective marketing activities and demonstrate bottom line results.

Whether you're a B2B or B2C marketer, you can start by focusing on this standard set of core content marketing metrics:

Pay attention to the following metrics to understand areas where engagement is strong:

• Unique Visitors: The total number of distinct visitors, or individuals, that come to your site in a given time period.

• Page Views: The total number of pages viewed on our website in a given time period.

• Average Visit Duration: The average time spent on your website, per visit. This number is determined by dividing the total duration of all visits by the number of visits in a given time period.

• Return Visits: The number of total visits from users who have visited your website previously.

• Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who enter your site, view one page and exit, or "bounce", without viewing additional content.

• Social Sharing The spreading of content from user to user through social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, email and others.

Engagement

This concept relates to stickiness – in other words, how much and how often your prospects and customers are engaging with and returning to your site.

Be sure to pinpoint areas of low engagement so you can make improvements, but also look beyond the numbers to fully understand why performance may be weak.

Virality

Word of mouth is powerful. When people value your services, they are more inclined to make their perspectives known. Given the nature of today's social web, the level of exposure is that much greater, with the potential to generate incremental business through organic traffic. Jonah Berger, a professor of marketing at Wharton Business School points out that consumers are more likely to talk about products and companies they find personally relevant, emotionally engaging and practical.

When analyzing virality, it's important to understand who and what made your content take off in the first place. What topic resonated with your audience? Did the content format allow for easy sharing? What triggers caused your audience to share? Shares give your content a higher probability of gaining visibility. Take the "Epic Split" Volvo Truck video as an example. In two days, Volvo's video garnered over 6 million views on YouTube. In this case, exciting visual content and a recognizable spokesman drove virality.

Conversions

Content marketing is effective in building awareness and attracting new interest; and lately, measuring lead activity through the sales funnel has become more achievable than ever.

When it comes to lead generation, it's important to attribute the number of leads garnered by content marketing. Every "entry point" into your content marketing must be tagged with some kind of analytics code. This allows you to see exactly where the leads are coming from, such as social media, advertising email marketing, etc.

Revenue

Tying revenue to your content marketing efforts is incredibly difficult, but, at the end of the day, it's absolutely necessary to proving your value as a content marketer.

In order to measure this, you must know the total amount of sales deals closed that can be attributed to content marketing – both directly (i.e. a user first engages with your business through content) and indirectly (the lead was nurtured with content during the decision making process).

Now comes the fun part. As a content marketer, you need to make the most of a finite budget for developing content and recruiting eyeballs. With so many marketing tactics and channels available, you need to make sure your content plan attracts your highest-value customers.